ABOSTON correspondent of the new York “Tribune,” in speaking of the late Professor Agassiz, remarks that he was singularly unmethodical in his habits. Men who live and work by rule would be puzzled to understand how the great scientist contrived to do so much without these helps. Agassiz lived and worked by inspiration. “If he was suddenly seized with an interest in some scientific inquiry, he would pursue it at once, — putting by, perhaps, other work in which he had just got fairly started. ‘I always like to take advantage of my productive moods,’ he said to me. Thus he often had several irons in the fire, only one of which might be ultimately finished. Probably he saw that the last iron promised to work up better than the first. He never could be made to work like a machine, turning out a definite quantity at regular intervals. He never felt bound to regard the rule that you must finish one thing before you begin another, so emphatically presented in the old copy-books.”
The fact here stated concerning the habits of Agassiz, points to an important principle of intellectual labor which merits the attention of all mental workers. There are some persons who seem to think the great end and aim of life is to practice the minor virtues. To be courteous, punctual, economical in the management of time and money, — to do one thing at a time, and never to procrastinate, — in 273 short, moral dexterity and handiness, — are qualities which they never tire of glorifying, and which, above all others, they aim to exemplify in their own lives and characters. Almost every liberally-educated man can remember some persons of this class whom he knew in college, — young men who were marked by their associates for their enslavement to certain stiff, cast-iron rules, more inflexible than the laws of the Medes and Persians, so often referred to by stump-speakers, — by which they regulated their minutest actions. Over their mantels were posted a long string of regulations, which, at a heroic sacrifice of comfort, they daily and sedulously observed, — such as these: “Remember to: 1. Rise at 6. 2. Recitation at 7. 3. Breakfast at 8. 4. Exercise half an hour. 5. Study two hours;” and so on. If they had an hour or a half-hour for general reading, they would read to the end of it with the most exemplary conscientiousness, however stupid they felt, or however persistently their wits went wool-gathering; and, on the other hand, they would shut the book exactly on the instant when the minute-hand got opposite the dot, however deeply the passage might chance to interest them. Such martyrs to method are generally very conscientious men, who honestly wish to make the most of their faculties and opportunities; but generally, we fear that they are not overstocked with brains, and, as they do not create a prodigious sensation in college, so they are rarely guilty of setting any rivers on fire after graduation. It was good people of this kind that Sir Walter Scott had in his mind’s eye when he said he had never known a man of genius who could be perfectly regular in his habits; whilst he had known many blockheads who 274 could. The Roman poet, Juvenal, with his usual vigorous touch, has painted a “representative man” of this class:
“If he but walk a mile, he first must look
For the fit hour and minute in his book;
If his eye itch, the pain will still endure.
Nor, till a scheme be raised, apply the cure.”
Now, it is well to have some method in one’s actions, — even in one’s madness, as did Hamlet; but to be shackled by many and minute rules of conduct, — to rule all one’s actions with a ruler, — to divide one’s time with a pair of compasses, and allow precisely so much to this thing and so much to that, — is an intolerable torment. The virtues that accompany method, — such as punctuality, the disposition not to loiter, and the power of working up spare moments for useful purposes, — are all commendable; they help a man to do his work triumphantly, and in an easy, assured manner; but it is possible to overrate their value. They oil the wheels of life, and make them run without hitch or creaking; but they do not determine the character of that life. Their only value is derivative, and they have no more power to do the business of life than a pulley has to lift a weight. Robert Hall used to say of early rising, that the real question was not what time you get up, but what do you do when you are up. So method and the improvement of time are important in themselves; but a far more important question is, how do you improve your time? It is well to be at your post at the very moment the clock strikes the hour; but it is far more important to be able to discharge its duties after you have got there. Mental stature, intellectual power, has not a very close relation, we fear, to the virtues of a martinet. A 275 wise, thoughtful, useful man, — a clear-headed reasoner, a profound thinker, — may be immethodical, dilatory, slovenly, just as a giant may be clumsy, awkward, and loose in all his make-up.
Perhaps no two persons were ever more unlike each other, in respect to method or system, than Southey and Coleridge. They strikingly illustrate the advantages and drawbacks of the habit of mind which has been so much lauded. Southey was as regular as a clock. Always prompt and punctual, he did his work with the exactness and precision of a machine; and the watch no sooner ticked the hour than his literary tale of brick was forthcoming. He wrote poetry before breakfast; he read during breakfast; he read history till dinner; he corrected proof-sheets between dinner and tea; he wrote an essay for the “Quarterly” afterwards; and after supper composed “The Doctor,” an elaborate jest. Never was there a greater miser of time; never, since Pliny, were moments so conscientiously improved. Even when walking for exercise, he took a book with him. But what does his life prove, except that the habits of mind best fitted for communicating information, — habits formed with the greatest care, and daily regulated by the best motives, — are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate? Southey’s works are prodigies of learning and labor; but who reads them now? What work has he produced which the world “will not willingly let die”; what bold, striking thoughts has he uttered which stick in the memory like barbed arrows, that cannot be withdrawn? Of the hundred and three volumes, which, in addition to the one hundred and fifty review-articles, he so painfully composed, not one, in all probability, 276 except possibly the “Life of Nelson, of which his publisher dictated the subject and size, will be read fifty years hence. The truth is, Southey read and wrote so systematically and so mechanically, — so much like a machine, — that his life was monotonous and humdrum,; it had no adventures, changes, events, or experiences; and hence his works show a painful want of intellectual bone and muscle, and rarely touch the hearts or thrill the sympathies of his hearers. Gorgeous passages may be found in them, — proofs of vigorous fancy and imagination; but his persons and their adventures are so supernatural — so dreamy, phantom-like, and out of the circle of human sympathies, both in their triumphs and sufferings, — that his elaborate and ambitious poems produce on us the impression of a splendid but unsubstantial nightmare.
Now look at Coleridge. He passed his whole life out at elbows, physically and morally. He loitered and dawdled; he wasted whole weeks and months; he had no sense of the value of minutes; he prosecuted a thousand literary schemes which were never finished; and, when he died, left behind him, as Lamb playfully said, “forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity, not one of them complete.” It is in these fragments, — in casual remarks, scribbled often on the margins of books, and reminding us of the Sibyl’s leaves, — in imperfectly-reported conversations, and in a few brief but exquisitely-harmonized poems, that we must look for the proof of Coleridge’s mighty but imperfectly-recorded powers. Yet who that is familiar with these, and with the writings of Southey, can doubt that Coleridge was by far the greater man of the two; and who can help suspecting that there was, if not a direct connection, at 277 least a strong sympathy between his genius and his slovenliness? He had, as another has said, a gift for seeing the difficulties of life, its seamy side, its incongruities and contradictions, which he would probably have lost if he had been more respectable and victorious.
“But Agassiz’s or Coleridge’s method of working would be ruinous to any man who had not their wonderful faculties, their far-sight and insight.” No doubt; and therefore neither of them ever proposed his own method of working as a model for others. “Once, in my presence,” says the correspondent of the “Tribune,” “a near relative ventured to ask him (Agassiz) if the did not think he would accomplish more if he finished one thing before he began another. ‘Every man must work according to his own method,’ he replied. It was frequently a hard thing to get him to sign a paper, or write a letter (except for somebody else), or to look over accounts, or to do little routine work. Yet he could never have attained his great eminence in science if he had not paid, in his department, great attention to the minutest and apparently the most insignificant details. Looking at the drawing of a fish made by his artist, he said, after taking a single glance, “it is a beautiful drawing, but don’t you see you have left out two or three of the scales?”
The sum of the matter is, method, like fire, is a good slave, but a bad master, and is too apt to degenerate, like other minor virtues, into mere priggishness. As intellectual companions, your systematic, square-rule-and-compass men are, of all persons, the dullest and most unsatisfying. “I do not like,’ says the charming French writer, Xavier De Maistre, in his “Voyage autour de ma Chambre,” “people who are so completely the masters of their steps and 278 their ideas that they say to themselves, ‘To-day I will make three visits; I will write four letters; I will finish that work which I have begun.’ ” We sympathize with him. We respect the literary Pharisees, who tithe mental mint, anise, and cummin, with scrupulous regularity; but we cannot love them. Even in morals, it is not the most straight-laced persons, — the “unco guid,” who never deviate by a hair’s breadth from the path of propriety, — that are the best Christians, the best neighbors and citizens, parents or children, husbands or wives. John Milton has justly denounced those scrupulists “who, when God has set us in a fair allowance of way, never leave subtleizing and casuisting till they have straightened and pared that liberal path into a razor’s edge to walk on.” And the wise old Gascon, Montaigne, with his usual sagacity, observes of systems of conduct generally, that a young man ought sometimes “to cross his own rules,” to awake his vigor, and to keep it from growing faint and rusty; “for there is no course of life so weak as that which is carried on by rule and discipline.” The reader of Dickens will remember the old clock at Dr. Blimber’s, whose monotonous beat rapped every second on the head as soon as it was born, killing it stone-dead on the spot. Like this, we fear, is the murderous clock-work of many human lives.